The Need For Speed - Why Site Speed Has A Direct Impact On Your Sales

If you're not fast, then you're probably last...

We've all been there. You find the item that you've been looking for on Google - at the price you want to pay. It may be from a seller you've never heard of before and not your usual Amazon or eBay contacts, but with a bit of diligence you figure it could be worth it to get the best price.

With some degree of delight, you quickly click the link to take you to find out more about the product, the delivery costs and the seller… but… then…. it….. all…… grinds……. to…….. a……… long………. frustrating……….. halt!

How long would you 'allow' a browser to load a web page before you lose interest and look elsewhere?

a) 6 seconds?
b) 16 seconds?
c) 26 seconds?

Nope, none of the above. Try 4 seconds - and that's being generous these days.

The world wide web is a vast and crowded marketplace. Competition for traffic is fierce and users are an impatient, savvy bunch. They can afford to be because they know that if you can't give them what they want quickly and efficiently, then someone else will - probably your competition.

The Growing Importance of Site Speed

Better For Users

User experience (UX) is a crucial part of any successful website and the speed of your site is the first hurdle that your users need to be able to glide over without even noticing - you simply cannot afford to let them trip over and face plant at this stage. This may sound obvious, but we know from experience that many site managers tend to stubbornly give themselves the benefit of doubt. After all they are affiliated with the site and know how good their products and services are. The problem is that users are completely impartial and impatient, they simply don't care enough to hang about if they can't get what they need quickly and easily.

Better For Rankings

Google announced as early as 2010 that they would be taking site speed into account as one of the things they look at when determining rankings. Later, they developed a page speed tool to assist webmasters in optimising their web page content. This has since been expanded to check how 'mobile friendly' your website is as well. This ties in snugly with their modus operandi that in order to gain better rankings, user experience should come always come first.

How You Can Improve Site Speed?

There are lots of areas that can be improved to speed up the loading time of your website. Each site will be different of course, but here are a few things that can have a real impact:

- Optimise Images for web use
- Check your hosting server response time
- Remove irrelevant or unused functionality
- Remove stray code
- Re-order calls to external render-blocking code (JavaScript, CSS etc.)
- Inline smaller script actions
- Optimise your style sheets (CSS)

Take The Speed Test

You can run an independent speed test of your website from external servers using this handy speed testing tool.

Our site which is built on the Big Red Business Platform and loads within half a second. This is because we take care of the above issues when we are building and developing websites for our customers: 

Is Your Site Speed Losing You Business?

If your site failed the speed test don't wait around for it crash and burn, contact Big Red now before it's too late.

Call us on 0141 771 7242, or...

Email Us